HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

enjoylife

185 karma · joined February 4, 2013

I write at: https://mdc.life
submissionscomments
enjoylife··on Opus 5.5 is good at explainer videos
I agree there will always be a need for community. Human connections. Folks experiencing the tastes, smells, etc.

Eg from your share, the model output “I prefer it Scotch-heavy rather than 50/50 because otherwise it gets very sweet.”

It’s basically cribbed this from someone; it literally can’t taste.

The frontier labs are not yet able to do rlvr over mixology/meatspace. So maybe think on how to capitalize on that.

enjoylife··on “CEO said a thing” journalism
Another restatement of Brandolini’s Law. The cost of parroting this kind of information is very low, while the cost of refuting it is very high. And the value an outlet can extract from its readership to fund that refutation is nowhere close to cover its outlay. Maybe a counter is the occasional take-down article can sometimes go more viral than the original claim, but chasing those is probably unprofitable too.
enjoylife··on Gemini 2.5 Computer Use model
One thought is once it can touch the underlying system, it can provision resources, spawn processes, and persist itself, crossing the line from tool to autonomous entity. I admit you could do that in a browser shell nowadays, just maybe with more restrictions and guardrails. I don’t have any strong opinions here, but I do think a lower cost to escape the walled gardens agi starts in will be a factor
enjoylife··on Gemini 2.5 Computer Use model
> It is not yet optimized for desktop OS-level control

Alas, AGI is not yet here. But I feel like if this OS-level of control was good enough, and the cost of the LLM in the loop wasn't bad, maybe that would be enough to kick start something akin to AGI.

enjoylife··on Find SF parking cops
Officers are a limited resource, so their deployment matters. Are they assigned to areas that most benefit citizens, or those that most benefit the city? Is the focus on maximizing ticket revenue, or addressing the most dangerous violations, like blocked bike lanes? Are they primarily a revenue tool, a public safety measure, or just extra eyes on the street? Do wealthier neighborhoods receive more enforcement, effectively buying themselves safer streets? Basically I'm wondering does parking enforcement benefit SF residents uniformly?
enjoylife··on Find SF parking cops
Officer 0336 is raking it in for the city. I wonder if there is a correlation with the areas which generate a lot of tickets and other city datasets. Perhaps crime rate or average household income?
enjoylife··on OpenAI Progress
Interesting but cherry picked excerpts. Show me more, e.g. a distribution over various temp or top_p.
enjoylife··on Reflections on OpenAI
I think we’ve always shaped ourselves based what we’re capable of building. Think of how infrastructure such as buildings and roadways shape our lives within them. What I do agree with you, is how LLMs are shaping our mental thought how we are offloading a lot of our mental capacities with blind trust in the LLM output.
enjoylife··on Kepler.gl
I agree that these visuals rarely drive decisions on their own. They’re more like supporting tools… useful for framing an argument or guiding a narrative in a presentation, especially when static.

Unless it’s interactive or tied to live data the usefulness of the visualization produced is limited.. it’s a shame and it’s something this tools should pivot towards

enjoylife··on Model Once, Represent Everywhere: UDA (Unified Data Architecture) at Netflix
> Once concepts are selected, Sphere walks the knowledge graph and generates SQL queries to retrieve data from the warehouse, no manual joins or technical mediation required.

If I had to guess this is how eng pitched it to the business to carve out the time to build this tooling. As with all these internally built schemas, ui’s, tooling, etc… they’re never gonna post how much this is actually used relative to the work arounds ds and eng use in their day to day.

enjoylife··on Google's AI Mode is 'the definition of theft,' publishers say
Maybe some reverse attribution to determine how much credit to give different sources in the old top k results. Maybe a llm that is trained on fact finding, and giving proper % of credit. But this would probably require a collective contract in place to benefit site owners, which means its never going to happen.
enjoylife··on A Research Preview of Codex
> these tools are not only useful for writing the final code

This sparked a thought in how a large part of the job is often the work needed to demonstrate impact. I think this aspect is often overlooked by some of the good engineers not yet taking advantage of the AI tooling. LLM loops may not yet be good enough to produce shippable code by themselves, but they sure are capable to help reduce the overhead of these up and out communicative tasks.

enjoylife··on ChatGPT could never get a PhD in geography
“‘It’s still learning’ is a misnomer. The model isn’t learning—we are. LLMs are static after training; all improvement comes from human iteration in the outer loop: fine-tuning, prompt engineering, tool integration, retrieval. Until the outer loop itself becomes autonomous and self-improving, we’re nowhere near AGI. Current hype confuses capability with agency.
enjoylife··on Show HN: Min.js style compression of tech docs for LLM context
Was going to point this out too. One suggestion would be to try this on libraries having recent major semvar bumps. See if the compressed docs do better on the backwards incompatible changes.
enjoylife··on The cost of Go's panic and recover
Only at the very end does the article call out there is actually a performance aspect if you use panic and recover as intended.

> So it seems that panic and recover can be beneficial to performance in at least some situations.

Namely top level & centralized recovery handling. I'll also point out its important your panic recovery must happen in a deferred function if your kicking off new goroutines. For example, your server library probably has default panic recovery on the goroutines handling inbound requests, but any new goroutines you create as part of handling the request (e.g. to parallelize work), will not have this handling built in. See https://go.dev/blog/defer-panic-and-recover for more.

enjoylife··on Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat
We’re seeing a clear divide where both competitive gamers and hackers are retreating into their own ecosystems, away from public matchmaking. Public matchmaking has simply become too optimized/lucrative to sustain trust or meaningful competition. Private matchmaking and closed communities are thriving, raising the average skill ceiling in competitive. Similarly, hacking communities are evolving with easier forms of payment and distribution. The monetary aspects are huge. But most importantly, both cultures push each away. Your persona of someone who plays with integrity and crosses the competitive and hacker mentality is pretty much gone.
enjoylife··on The brain summons deep sleep for healing from life-threatening injury
I vividly remember the difference intense hockey conditioning camps, sleep and recovery can cause. During these camp I pushed my heart, with many drills being 30+ seconds at max heart rate. Afterwards I was exhausted, chest felt terrible. But I was so tired, I didn’t have the usual movements at night, and had much longer deep sleep. The recovery the next day was so dramatic compared to prior workout sessions. Way less inflammation across my joints. As compared to sessions where I only pushed my heart rate to 30-60%
enjoylife··on AI's $600B Question
I’ll add that even if the papers we all wanted were more freely accesible, the replication and completeness of their described methods would be another source of slowdown.
enjoylife··on How Does GPT-4o Encode Images?
> Interestingly enough, it’s actually more efficient to send text as images: A 512x512 image with a small but readable font can easily fit 400-500 tokens worth of text, yet you’re only charged for 170 input tokens plus the 85 for the ‘master thumbnail’ for a grand total of 255 tokens—far less than the number of words on the image.

Sounds like an arbitrage opportunity for all those gpt wrappers. Price your cost per token the same, send over the prompt via image, pocket the difference?

enjoylife··on The average store size in the US is the smallest it's been in at least 17 years
For most non-perishables it’s the most time efficient in minimizing the number of trips. Also given how often I go, ~once a month, each time I get the same sort of novelty as a Trader Joe's for they will have swapped out many items.
enjoylife··on Tesla Cybertruck Pricing and Specs
If the “Lindy effect” holds true for the 911, it might be quite a long time before the 911 and its variants go out of style. The same cannot be said for the cyber truck, and all of the other short lived prototype cars that have very harsh angular lines.
enjoylife··on A coder considers the waning days of the craft
Yeah, this author sounds more of an up-and-coming software developer. The cited example is something that someone should be easily able to do in their day to day language.

The ability for chatGPT to essentially translate/expand your knowledge out to other languages (eg “how do I read in a file to utf8 again” ). It’s all just more leverage and power to solve the mundane, faster. The key point is you have to know the rough solution space already.

enjoylife··on What are dreams for?
For the example the op gave, probably not for an adult. But younger kids might. Also for complex domains, I find that dreams enumerate more possibilities/scenarios than I would have if awake.
enjoylife··on Tell HN: UC Berkeley's CS61A/B/C are the best courses to learn CS and coding
> 61C taught me how computers actually work and simultaneously made me quit the major

I'm genuinely curious, why did the course make you quit? Was it the material or the professor, or something else entirely?

enjoylife··on 99-year old trucking company Yellow shuts down, putting 30k out of work
I hope there will be a HBR or some other case study done on Yellow, because the interplay between bad loans + union demands + poor management seems like something US businesses need to be more prepared for.
enjoylife··on Apple’s Headset Hinges on Apps, but Don’t Expect Developers to Flock to It
There’s really only gonna be two camps of developers, working on native apps. Folks at some existing large company, with some sort of Apple partnership to cover cost, or folks working on their side projects to scratch some personal itch. There really isn't gonna be anyone in the middle burning money for a nonexistent user base.
enjoylife··on Why is desalination so difficult?
Looks like on average the data shows 42% agricultural. https://water.ca.gov/Programs/California-Water-Plan/Water-Po...
enjoylife··on GPT-Migrate converts repos from one lang/framework to another
One could argue we do already via code generation when we define protobuf definitions or other idl’s. But yeah a chat oriented idl which then code generates c, Go, python, just based on the required problem domain is an interesting vision.
enjoylife··on Things I wish I’d known before fulltime RVing (2017)
How is the range when pulling your trailer? From what I read the reduction is steep?
enjoylife··on KV.js
Yep. This is a quintessential example of “I’m going to learn by recreating the essence of a complex thing”… taken to the end. And then a logo is slapped on top. I’m all for js libs but this is not performant. Just use redis.
Page 1 of 3Next →